Test Tower of Light

Love was literally in the air in Rottweil, Germany, on Valentine’s Day, when the first couple to be wed inside the thyssenkrupp Elevator test tower was invited back to turn on the 246-m-tall structure’s architectural lighting system. On February 14, at sunset local time — 5:44 p.m. — the couple, married last year at the 220-m point inside the test tower, threw the switch that instantly bathed the landmark structure in the warm glow of 44 spotlights, allowing architects Werner Sobek and Helmut Jahn to realize their vision of a “Tower of Light.”

The tower has become a popular attraction in Rottweil, the oldest city in Germany’s Baden-Wuerttemberg state. Residents and shop owners were invited to put lights in their windows in return so that a veritable “dialogue of lights,” a representation of the relationship between the town and the test tower, could commence.

“The nighttime lighting has been an integral part of my design concept from the very beginning,” said Sobek. “The lighting had to be just as tender and virtually ‘immaterial’ as the tower’s fabric shell itself: elegant, unobtrusive, light as a feather — and by no means colorful or garish.”

More than a quarter of a million visitors have been awed by the view from the tower’s observation deck, the highest in Germany, since construction was completed in 2017. thyssenkrupp uses the one-of-a-kind facility to test MULTI, the world’s first ropeless elevator for high-rise buildings, as well as conventional high-speed elevators.

The tower lights will be switched on every evening, except during various weeks each year when bird migrations are taking place.